skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The latest casualty was podcasts. It's revolting.

Hmm?

Yes, there are adverts on all the podcasts I listen to. Many of my favorites offer members only ad-free versions. Usually I suffer through the ad supported versions because the adverts are easy enough to skip.

Some podcasts have too many adverts or annoyingly inserted advertising. Those are pretty 1 and done. No point listening to them.

IMO the (current) podcast market is a good example of how we can enjoy content and know the producers are compensated without having to deal with obtrusive marketing crap.

It is getting clear some podcasting is getting sucked into things like Spotify, but there is still enough good content I don't think it's a problem.
Some hard questions that I need to ask as someone that does set up complex data pipelines for customers as part of his job.

How do you want to monetize your product?
What is your runway as of today?
When do you project you will be self-sustainable?

It's all great to have an open source solution for pushing the data around, but I don't want to invest in learning a new tool only to see it vanish in 2-3 years or so.
No problems in Jersey City all day. Bleeping Computer article cites someone as saying it's a specific AS that's affected. JC routes through an AS in Newark, NJ and not NYC so, for me at least, there hasn't been an outage.
Because you’re infecting people with mind-viruses to force them to buy your crap. Advertising is about exploiting human psychology, taking advantage of people with weak impulse control, and outright lying.
That's not bad, I'd be willing to pay that and even more. I was simply unable to contact anyone at Comcast who was willing to entertain running fiber to a home. So I simply had to buy a home that had an option other than Comcast.

In another instance, I needed symmetric fiber at one of my businesses. I contacted Comcast, the business/commercial departments multiple times, got numerous peoples' names, left voice and email messages left and right and got nowhere after weeks. I ended up contacting a different ISP, signed up with them, and then on the install date, Comcast showed up to install the fiber modem (who were, of course, reselling it to the ISP I contracted with). I ended up paying the other ISP $1,700 per month.
My project is more "write Java expression trees, methods, etc. with lispy syntax" as opposed to "implement lisp directly in Java".

Thus car-cdr lists are not central to the project, but the only foreign dependency it uses so far is a persistent collections library and probably I am going to have it run the code generator so I can write "lisp style" Java with persistent collections.

You know you can write things like

Empty().and(33).and(122).and(75)

and avoid some of the type erasure trouble.
The problem isn't with copper, it's with the cost of building out amplifiers. It's a lot more cost effective to amplify downstream than upstream, especially when most use cases are heavily asymmetric.

(I'd expect that only in the past year or so has upstream been a lot more heavily utilized, what with massively increased work-from-home due to the pandemic. Before then, the primary stressors of the network were things like streaming 4k60 video.

And I'll be very surprised if any ISPs thought torrent uploads to be a use case worth optimizing for.)
I have worked for 15 years in tech (in the US) and hardly ever worked at a "VC-powered" firm. All the companies I worked at were cash flow positive and payed a lot. Bulk of the compensation came from stocks specially for senior levels. So there must be something else going on here rather than just "VC-money".
>I'm glad that this works and that there is another, more convenient and effective treatment option. But shouldn't we have some setup where if tax dollars pay for the research, the government should own a share of the IP commensurate with their funding level, and should then be able to have some say in pricing?

>Or, if you think that the government itself shouldn't own IP for a product on the market, can we create an independent non-profit which receives ownership, and whose charter aligns with actually treating as many people as possible?

The current model of government funded research is like backing a Kickstarter because you want to see the product made, but get no direct benefit. It is made because we as a people think the world will be better off with the product, than without, and are willing to pay to make that happen.

I think government co-venture is also great option, as long as it is negotiated up front and we can keep political corruption out of it. However, the question then becomes if drug development will dry up once the the government has locked down all the IP and nobody wants to partner with them.

I think another good model would be seed support for independent non-profit pharmaceutical(s) charted to balance reinvested profits with social benefit (without government owning the IP). The question and risk here becomes one of oversight and accountability.
This. Taskspooler is a powerful but simple tool that seems to be fairly unknown.
How is this going to solve the chief bandwidth problem on the internet of watching funny cat videos and perusing dank memes?
> Then why isn't it done as such in all instances?

It is. Control groups are no-treatment if no approved treatment exists, or current standard of care if there's an approved treatment. That's standard practice.

> It seems that whenever a perfect placebo be permissible, that is what is being used rather than the current standard of care.

If by "perfect placebo," you mean "no treatment," that's not correct, and is considered unethical.
> What is the purpose of a USB2.0 port on a new computer in 2021?

Volume cost savings, presumably. I guess that's the port you use for input devices since they don't really require high bandwidth connections...
2 things j funded via Kickstarter never worked. One gave full refund. The other gave some people a few peices they had made then took the money and ran. Learned my lesson to never back something unless your fine losing your money and never getting anything
tcm is like this.
I've seen https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/sql-createindex.html#SQL-... work well in practice on busy transactional databases. I'd be interested in knowing about cases where it doesn't work well.

My experience on systems without indexes differs strongly from yours. Yes, they can work well. But if you have multiple use cases for how your data is being queried, they push you into keeping multiple copies of your data. And then it is very, very easy to lose consistency. And yes, I know about "eventual consistency" and all that - I've found that in practice it is a nightmare of special cases that winds up nowhere good.
How bout' this: later tonight, I'll unplug my modem and try to play some Plex on my LAN. Stand by for a few hours, and I'll have an answer. :-)
It's how I keep track of how old my daughter is...
I think you're right, but if people had to pay even a few dollars a month for Facebook and Twitter I think it would make a big dent in amount of nonstop drivel and shitposting that goes on. And that's another reason it won't happen, it would reduce eyeballs for the ads.
Heroku PG Now Up to 4TB / 768GB RAM
Would it maybe be an idea to, going forward, color the cables individually before putting them into the ground?
I recently tried to buy a System76 laptop and unfortunately had a terrible experience. It was massively delayed and they weren't transparent at all about how long it was going to be delayed. I wound up going with a Juno Computers laptop instead and it's been great so far.
Mozilla ran the numbers and it's not a huge penalty.

It's just frustrating that it's one more optimization that is getting turned off. And makes the internet just a tiny bit worse as a result. It's like death by a thousand cuts.
A long time ago I had a Google-branded alarm clock which had wheels and ran away when it rang so you couldn't hit snooze. Fun times.
I always find great stuff when I read @leahneukirchen's blog posts.
"Lightweight job queue system" is in the first line of the README. I'm struggling to come up with any sort of better description than that.

Some attempts:

* shell-controllable queue of commands
* queue for running commands one after another

but I still think the README's is the best.
Christ, every reply to this thread is an anecdote.

Please back up assertions with _some_ data point..
That's not reassuring in a comment on an update where they are completely eliminating a tier.
As an owner of a HiDPI laptop, I'm here to tell you that if you want to connect it to an external monitor, you will be disappointed in Linux. For a laptop-monitor combination in Linux, standard resolution is absolutely the way to go.

This isn't a rant. Mad, mad respect for Linux here, and longtime Linux user.

KDE only offers a single scaling factor, so you must scale the laptop and the external screens identically. That means all at 2:1, or 1.5:1, or what have you -- this means one of your screens will be scaled improperly (too fine or too large). Gnome does the same, I believe. I have heard Pop_OS can scale monitors differently but didn't try it.
You queue up terminal commands to be run in the background so that you can continue doing other things in the meantime.
Just as an example: I read some dev newsletters, they include a block of paid-for job postings. Highly relevant with the content. Together with the occasional sponsored post link (also still relevant content) this appears to fund them just fine.

This isn't "ad free" but it's close enough in my opinion. There's a huge gulf between contextually relevant content curated by the creators and the kind of shite that ad networks push.
Or you could serve a fully static site with vanilla JS.
Hahah I remember that one! It jumped off the nightstand and ran around the room, didn't it? That was hilarious.
That's Librem.
I own this laptop, it’s awesome. The only complaint I have is that the battery really functions more as a UPS. The System76 support is really top notch too.
> For every seeing-programmer I have ever met, and I suspect strongly all seeing-programmers, that length is measured in "source-code pixels". Not lines, or characters, but literal field of view.

By the same logic: font size affects number of bugs.

I still doubt it. First, the size of the mental model is definitely not related to physical source code length, but rather an abstract, hard to define "operation" concept. Therefore "hello world" is the same size, no matter how large your font size is nor how much whitespace there is between the prologue and the first statement/expression.

In fact, I would even argue, one's mental abstraction is farther from the actual on-screen code the more abbreviated your code is. If it reads like this:

MC(AV(z),AV(w),m*k); /* copy old contents */
if(b){ra(z); fa(w);} /* 1=b iff w is permanent */
*AS(z)=m1=AM(z)/k; AN(z)=m1*c; /* "optimal" use of space */

It doesn't matter how much space it occupies on screen. The simple mapping of names to identities is going to fill the entirety of your working memory. And I wouldn't believe you can "learn" this mapping. Our memory works in terms of concepts, not letters; the reason a 7 word passphrase is almost as easy to remember as a 7 character password. The identifiers here do not follow any discernible pattern (sometimes it's memset, other times it's MC instead of memcpy), and I would really doubt any structure can be followed at two chars per identifier. People already have problems remembering the much shorter and much more descriptive set of POSIX system calls.

> Sometimes you can read a program, and sometimes you can't, but when you can't, the damage that scrolling does seems infinitely worse.

I've worked for companies that used to remote into old X11 servers for viewing the code. Latency was measured in seconds. Impact of scrolling would have been huge. It was definitely not the biggest impact to productivity. In my experience, branchy code flow was still the biggest hinder.

> Yes, and usually by a factor of a thousand or more.

This would imply a "power law" of code reuse, where the code you are likely to need is closer to the point where you need it. The only way I would believe such a rule is, precisely, if your code base doesn't reuse any code at all and people just copy code "close to point of use" due to some arcane coding style.

My impression: I'm assuming people are cargo culting here.
Sony Announces the Alpha 1
Some libraries are older than jQuery! <g>
We've known each other for highschool-age years.
J. M. Keynes and the Visible Hands
“Out of every hundred men, ten shouldn’t be there, eighty are just targets”
> There’s an old Chinese saying:

> To know the time, you must first connect to the internet.

> – Sun Inc.

amazing
perhaps margin of error should be raised to accommodate this change of about 1%, although the set of drives under test is likely not the same between years
Neuml/paperetl: ETL processes for medical and scientific papers
Fios service is fantastic, and this morning's outage barely impacted me in Jersey City (only some disruption that seemed to be related to NYC area DCs more than Fios service itself). I have found their service to be very reliable for years now, with throughput that does not fluctuate (I get what I pay for regardless of the time of day) and lower latency than I had with Comcast. No regrets at all.

The only real complaint I have is that Verizon still seems to be unable to deploy IPv6. They have promised it for years and never seem to get past the testing phase.
StavrosK, you're my hero. Thanks for the delightful write-up.
No, complexity strikes again. I haven't used sudo in years, preferring to use doas now. Its essential code is less than 500 lines and it does everything I've ever used sudo for, and that includes much more than `sudo <runupdates>`.

$ man doas | wc -l
58
$ man doas.conf | wc -l
101
$ man sudo | wc -l
741
$ man sudoers | wc -l
3254

And a bonus:

$ man sudoers | grep -C1 despair
The sudoers file grammar will be described below in Extended Backus-Naur
Form (EBNF). Don't despair if you are unfamiliar with EBNF; it is fairly
simple, and the definitions below are annotated.

That only accounts for a small subset of sudo's complexity. It's easily 100x more complex than it needs to be to solve this problem. Now compare the two CVE lists:

http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/security/doa...

http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/security/sud...

My reaction to this vulnerability was mild amusement, then later wondering if I should go discredit the inevitable Rust brigade. We don't have to rewrite everything in Rust to get better security. We just have to use simpler tools.
Thanks for catching that usability issue, we agree the double scrolling is not ideal. This wasn't the intended functionality and I can't imagine how long it would have taken for us to catch this. Here's the link to the MR https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_request... we'll have a fix going live shortly
They can get temporary cellular devices to fill in on generator power pretty quickly. I know most if not all phone lines are underground, but something like a 2000-pair "wet pulp" repair (necessary in the first place due to negligence) takes a week. I don't know the name of these devices but something of that nature was deployed in Nashville on Dec 25 when the AT&T building was bombed and I think most cell service downtown was restored the next day.
If that's for me, I really appreciate that :)

There's obviously that option on Twitter (same username as here), if you want to follow there ;)
It depends on the contract made between the government and the developer before funding was issued.
> Never understood this company. Lenovo and Dell sell computers with Ubuntu or Fedora pre-installed, that have been tested and are guaranteed to be fully compatible with Linux.

This hasn't always been the case. System76 has been around since 2005.

> Why would you go with System76, which is selling rebranded Clevo laptops with a markup, and PopOS, which is an Ubuntu derivative?

To support a company whose entire purpose is to provide hardware running Linux, as opposed to one which does it as a small niche within their much larger Windows-based business.
Many laptops are rebranded from ODMs. PopOS has some nice touches over Ubuntu. Plus you get official, dedicated support.

It comes with a premium because they're a small OEM, but it's not THAT bad of a deal.
For a while, people were getting in trouble for using the word, "niggardly," even though it had nothing to do with the offensive term that it sounds like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_n...
just build your own internet
Gearman is popular if your needs are more complex than this. http://gearman.org/
Thanks! I wasn't sure if it would be obvious enough, I don't think many people got it.
Seems like there's too much bait-and-switch happening here to trust GitLab anymore. They enacted an account-locking change to their MFA reset policy without so much as an e-mail to effected users over the summer, and now they're increasing their pricing. There must be a way for GitLab to grow that doesn't involve them inconveniencing existing users like this.
Yes! It somehow managed to hide deep under my dresser every morning.
I saw some disruptions in services that people in my household rely on, but I think that is because of disruptions in DCs located in NYC and not FiOS itself.
This describes me. I currently have 3467 tabs. Firefox is the only browser that can handle this.
Doppler: Using Environment Variables in Python for App Configuration
For years we have been indoctrinated that having a root account is evil and sudo is the proper salvation.

Turns out that any user could make a root account.
Would you take Phenibut?
From the title I was sure that this would be some horrible misuse of "machine
learning" to stand-in for "AI" but while Shannon himself never uses the term in
the video, the title seems accurate enough.

To summarise: a model mouse, named Theseus, is moved around a maze by a system
of electromagnets placed under the maze and guided by an electromechanical
computer (made with telephone relays). The computer is from Bell Labs and given
the date listed for the video ("early 1950's") it may be a Model VI.

The program that drives the mouse is a combination of a search algorithm with
some kind of modular memory. The mouse first finds its way around the maze by
successivly trying a set of four moves at right angles. The sequence seems to
be: move forward; if that's impossible, turn 90° CW; repeat. This eventually
finds a path to the end of the maze, where a goal is placed (possibly magnetic).
In more modern terms, the program learns a plan to navigate the maze. Once the
plan is learned it can be re-used any number of times to solve the maze without
any more searching.

The interesting thing is that, if the maze changes, the program only needs to
replace part of its learned plan. Shannon demonstrates this by moving around
some of the walls of the maze, which are modular segments. Theseus initially
enters its searching routine, until it finds its way to the part of the maze
that it knows already. After that, it's smooth sailing, following the plan it
already knows.

I have no idea what that technique is that does that. If I guessed, I'd guess
that the program has a model of its world -a map of the maze- or, more
interestingly, it builds one as it goes along. When the maze changes, the
program updates its model, but it is able to update only as much of the model as
corresponds to the part of the world that has really changed. This suggests some
kind of object permanence assumption, an encoding of the knowledge that if the
state of some entity in the world is not known to have changed, then it has not
changed. Or, in other words, some solution to the frame problem (which was
actually described about a decade later than Shannon's demonstration).

Note well that modern AI systems very rarely exhibit this ability. For instance,
deep neural networks cannot update their models - not partly, not wholesale.
Like I say, I have no idea what the approach is that is demonstrated. It may be
something well-known but rarely used these days. It may be something that
Shannon came up with before John McCarthy fathered AI and so it never really
caught on as an AI approach. If anyone knows, please do tell, I'm very curious.

In any case "Theseus" (rather, its AI) seems to exhibit what McCarthy called
"elaboration tolerance", making formal representations of facts that can be
modified easily:

http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/elaboration.html
Oh that's funny, I have the same laptop with you!

$ neofetch --off

sscarduzio@nash
---------------
OS: Ubuntu 20.10 x86_64
Host: XPS 13 7390 2-in-1
Kernel: 5.8.0-40-generic
Uptime: 3 days, 10 hours, 34 mins
Packages: 3506 (dpkg), 14 (flatpak), 27 (snap)
Shell: bash 5.0.17
Resolution: 1920x1200
DE: GNOME
WM: Mutter
WM Theme: Yaru-dark
Theme: Yaru-dark [GTK2/3]
Icons: Yaru [GTK2/3]
Terminal: gnome-terminal
CPU: Intel i7-1065G7 (8) @ 3.900GHz
GPU: Intel Iris Plus Graphics G7
Memory: 7620MiB / 15781MiB

I use fractional scaling hidpi (1.3x) and no issues at all. But coming from a 2015 MBP 13" retina display, I can definitely tell the difference, and the MBP was much nicer to look at.

I opted fro the FHD+ instead of the 4K screen in my Dell for two reasons:

- 4K is *WAY* beyond Retina, which is already very dense for me.

- I was afraid the 4K would drain the battery (especially on Linux)

I really hope Dell will offer a sane ~3K display (i.e. Retina levels) in the future and remove the burden of choice for their customers (at least where it's not needed).

Before you ask: no coil whine for me, but the thin rubber feet peeled off after exactly one year. This pissed me off on a £2K laptop.
> Yep, these exist as alternatives as of now, but require an explicit payment step which might cause more friction than ads.

Payment from one user produces more revenue than showing ads to hundreds of users. That should be multiplied in to any analysis of friction.

> I think a service that allows for website usage based payments, a Spotify/Apple News for websites would be interesting.

There have been many attempts to do that, none of which have succeeded. One major problem: they tend to track all your web activity, and the kinds of people interested in services like this are very much the kinds of people who don't want to be tracked. Another problem: it's easier to convince people to pay for a specific source of content than to amorphously pay for "various content".
There are real-text headings above the button bank at the top and the images have the role="presentation" attribute, meaning they're meant to be ignored by assistive tech. What is there to address...
Ask HN: Is There Such a Thing as Competitive IKEA? Building
Was wondering if anyone's aware of competition where the goals are to build IKEA furniture as fast as possible and each round becomes an increasingly more difficult set to build
Are you referring to Clocky? - https://clocky.com/
Fox News is a hazard to our democracy
This is one of the few shows where I've hated every main character at different times throughout the series. I just started my second time through and I'm interest to see if I feel the same.
I really wish we will be able to see some interesting Mars things in our lifetime...
1) To support a linux-first vendor as oppose to multibillion dollar manufacturers throwing the community bones.
2) Commitment to open source and privacy, with open source firmware, their attempts to counteract Intel ME, etc.
3) Gaming and 3D ready laptops
4) Integration with their own distro
5) Actual professional customer support for linux (how capable or even human would Dell and Lenovo’s customer support be for their linux computers?)

I actually can’t think of a good reason outside of price to not get a computer from a linux first vendor like S76.
You're my hero, Yhippa!